1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of transliterating one writing system into another writing system and vice versa. More in particular, the invention relates to the field of transliterating one writing system into a complex character-based writing system, preferably a Chinese character-based writing system, and vice versa.
2. Description of Related Art
Languages using Chinese characters as at least part of their writing system suffer from the difficulty in memorizing the large number of characters that are need for daily use. Examples of such languages comprise Sinitic languages, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, although Korean and Vietnamese are today rarely written with Chinese characters.
The number of Chinese characters is large, and no accurate account has been made for determining the exact number. However, the number of Chinese characters included in the Kangxi dictionary, which acts as a reference, is approximately 47,035.
As reading teaching/learning and reading helps, several Romanization systems have been developed over the years. The most widely used today are Hanyu Pinyin for the official Chinese language of China, Hepburn Romanization for Japanese, McCune-Reischauer Romanization and Revised Romanization of Korean for Korean. Vietnamese is today officially writing in a version of the latin alphabet, which can be used to Romanize Chinese characters into Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation thereof.
Furthermore, the phonological nature of the languages that use Chinese characters results in that there are numerous homophonous characters, what makes it difficult for the learner to know which character to use.
For example, when using Microsoft Input Method Editor (IME) developed for writing in simplified Chinese characters via Hanyu Pinyin, there are 124 characters corresponding to “yi” (tone non discriminating Hanyu Pinyin). When using Microsoft Input Method Editor (IME) developed for writing in traditional Chinese characters via Hanyu Pinyin, there are 369 characters corresponding to “yi”. As for Japanese, with Microsoft IME 2002, there are 71 characters for “shi”. As a matter of fact, all characters used in one language do not have the same prevalent. Some are more commonly used than others. But still, the number of homophonous characters can exceed 100.
Also, most of the Chinese characters carry a hint on their meaning. For example, many characters relating to feeling have a component (called radical) bearing the meaning of “heart”, many characters relating to action made using hands have a radical bearing the meaning of “hand”, etc.
This hint on meaning are lost when the characters are romanized, thus it is difficult for the learner to find out the meaning of a transcribed word.
Then, there exist no tool to reliably transliterate one text written in a Romanization system, i.e. in a writing system conveying pronunciation, into Chinese characters bearing text, i.e. conveying meaning.